The notion that AI and other digital technologies will “democratize the art market” is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

A Brief Introduction to Technological Disruption

Clayton Christensen popularized the idea of technological disruption in the mid-1990s.

The concept fit seamlessly with the ascendance of digital technologies, proffering a convincing explanation for how companies such as Amazon, Uber, Facebook, and Twitter were to reconfigure established industry models in sectors ranging from journalism to publishing to food delivery and destroy incumbent firms. 

By the early 2000s, the idea had traveled well beyond academia and consulting to become a meme for how our era thinks about emerging technologies and their societal impact. Today, the most disruptive force in our economy is artificial intelligence (AI).

Though research on artificial intelligence dates to the 1930s, AI is currently experiencing a renaissance, both technologically and culturally. Substantive progress in machine learning and deep learning raises possibilities ranging from autonomous vehicles to robot surgeons to lethal autonomous weapons. Key to the goal of truly autonomous “thinking” machines, is the ongoing development of sophisticated algorithms.

Artificial Intelligence and Art

To get Marxist for just a moment, art has always been entwined with changes in the means of production. Twentieth-century examples of the art-technology relationship include Andy Warhol’s pop experiments with silk-screening, the Video Art Movement, and Net Art. 

Today, the same AI-enabled algorithms that power predictive policing or global financial transactions can be adjusted to facilitate human-machine collaboration in producing art. Contemporary artists working at the frontier of artificial intelligence include Mario Klingemann, Anna Ridler, Robbie Barrat, Tom White, Helena Sarin, Gene Kogan, Sofia Crespo, and Sougwen Chung.

In 2018, Christie’s sold the first piece of AI-generated art, created by a Paris-based collective of three human artists, for the unexpected amount of $432,500 (approximately forty-five times higher than the original estimate). The artists used a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create Portrait of Edmond Bellamy by digitizing 15,000 paintings created by human artists between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. 

In a cheeky flourish that would likely have made Andy “I Want to be a Machine” Warhol smile, the collective signed the piece with an equation instead of a name.

Past Performance May Not Indicate Future Results

Technological changes invariably inspire certain artists to innovate. There is nothing precisely new about the complex relationship between culture, technology, and money. However, the scale and speed of technological disruption today, and its cronyistic relationship to finance and Big Tech, raises difficult issues for anyone who thinks art has a function beyond the accumulation of wealth.

Algorithmic reality is reshaping the art world in the image of digital tech. From the algorithm's perspective, a random doodle saved in a shoebox and a Rembrandt have the same value and meaning, as both can be digitized to feed the machine and improve its ability to differentiate and generate content. This is why algorithms can have a weird flattening effect on creativity, be it textual, musical, or visual.

For example, Frieze documented a Rutgers University/Facebook collaboration to generate new images by sorting through over 80,000 digitized paintings dating back to the fourteenth century. It is less than reassuring that, “According to one of the researchers, the AI was programmed to make something with ‘arousal potential’ so that it wouldn’t be ‘considered boring’, something ‘novel, but not too novel’. In other words, the machine produced what a second-rate, market-conforming artist would make" (https://www.frieze.com/article...).

The Future of Art in an Algorithmic Age

 Art and artists will not disappear altogether in the 21st century. However, the divide between those few who succeed and those who must eke out a survival wage will only widen. A small number of superstars (the Damien Hirsts of this world) will thrive, but the entire middle tier of assessors, writers, teachers, experts, curators, and critics, as well as the majority of artists, can expect to be thrown into a world of likes and clicks driven by seemingly neutral (though they are not) algorithms.

The sleight-of-hand of the major technology companies is to frame hard-won expertise or talent as elitist (unless you are a software engineer), erode every institution that supported a broad and profitable artistic culture, reduce most practitioners to an indebted precariat, and then justify this destruction in the language of disruption. 

Yet, hopefully, to paraphrase a clever novelist, rebellion finds a way. To the Johnny Rottens of the future, wherever you may be incubating, we need you more than ever. 

*Note: Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), lead vocalist of The Sex Pistols, uttered the famous last words "ever get the feeling you've been cheated," as the band imploded in San Francisco, on January 14, 1978. (https://www.open-access.bcu.ac...)